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Performance, Politics, Art, Dialogue and Twitter

This is a short reflection on publishing the #GiveUpArt Twitter essay as part of the #SOTAflash conference, which ran alongside State of the Arts 2011. I reduced an essay (forthcoming in an Arts-Activism reader from Silent City) to forty 120-character tweets, which I scheduled at three-minute intervals between 11.30 and 1.30 on the day of the conference. My original thought was that this would be a sort of “essay as event” intervention into #SOTAflash and SOTA itself. As it happened, expanded far beyond that to become something else: thanks to the people who were taking part, something more interesting.

I had originally planned not to do anything on Twitter while the essay was being published, but I began to receive so many replies, objections, engagements and arguments – and began to see so many other interesting things to talk about in the feed – that I ended up having multiple parallel conversations about the ideas of #GiveUpArt while the essay was being tweeted. I was getting swept up in currents of conversation around the hashtag. I began to feel quite overwhelmed by the participation, and spent the full two hours frantically reading and responding to the comments.

Because so many ideas were flying around and being argued under the #SOTAflash hashtag already, my Twitter essay became a small nexus of chatter amid a much wider conversation with many other nexuses. Nexii.Nexapodes. I did dominate that feed for two hours, inevitably, but far less than I’d originally expected and worried about. It was thrilling to know that my conversations were just some among many: that the curators of #SOTAflash had created a multi-level and highly participatory site of argument alongside and around SOTA itself. The result is that several participants at SOTA quickly recognised that everything happening on the conference fringe was far more interesting and relevant than the conference itself, in form as well as in content. For my part, I couldn’t begin to understand why anyone would pay money to listen to dull, centrist speakers and have heavily-structured conversations rather than take part in a fluid, chaotic, freely-accessible multi-platform argument taking place in both cyber- and meatspace. Of course SOTA was dull: the form set it up to be so. It’s hopeless to expect anything worthwhile to come out of a conference format so out of touch with trends and currents in the way people now think and create. A hierarchical, authoritarian format will produce thought hemmed in by those structures of power: a horizontal, anarchic format will produce a wild variety of dissent and passionate, provocative thought.

As for #GiveUpArt, well, it became much more of a performance, much more of an event, than I’d originally expected: it was a series of stimulating interactions and conversations triggered by or taking place around the brief bursts of pre-planned thought, and that’s much more interesting than just publishing an essay in short snippets. As a result, I became much more of a performer, tweeting about my own frenetic tweeting, thanking people profusely, arguing more provocatively, enjoying the lights that were shining in my direction. Twitter just is this fascinating blur of writing and performance: it is writing-as-performance, or performance-as-writing. It is a real-time experience with a short-lived archive; readers/watchers are participating not-quite-simultaneously, or even several days after each other. Twitter’s texts are technically almost permanent (and can be made more permanent), but after a week they’re even less likely to be read than books in a library’s backstock. And even though an archive does exist, it’s really no more complete and accurate than an archive of a theatre production: you can see the script, the props, the film of the performance, the programme, the audience interviews, and still not really understand the feeling of being part of the event. Twitter, like so much of the internet, is the transitory masquerading as the permanent.

After the day, I’d intended to archive everything that was tweeted under the #GiveUpArt hashtag. But I got too busy and delayed for a few days, and now, as you can see, Twitter’s search archiving is so minimal that that conversation is no longer easily organised and archivable: to do so, I’d have to trawl through the personal feeds of everyone who participated and extract the relevant tweets, no longer accurately timestamped, and reconstruct the conversation as it happened. That’s far too time-consuming! – and the results would be incomplete and unsatisfying. But as I’ve implied, I’m almost glad it’s too much effort now to archive: I don’t think there’s really any suitable means of completely recording multidirectional Twitter conversations, and I don’t think such a recording would capture any relevant essence of the event. For a reader who wasn’t part of it, it would be like trying to listen in on a crackly audio recording of a busy argument; for a reader who was part of it, it would add nothing to the memory.

On the other hand, another version of the essay is soon to be published in print format, and I’m glad of that, too. It will be another aspect of the same project, in the way 2001’s different elements reflected and expanded on each other. A print essay is only minimally an event, just as a Twitter conversation is only minimally an essay – the two share aspects of each other, but are ultimately (and politically) different. I think I’ll find the print essay less immediately fulfilling than the Twitter conversation, but I also think I’ll remember it and what results more and for longer.

One thing I will record now is part a conversation which took place in a chat window while all the tweeting was going on. Its subjects are parallel to those of #GiveUpArt, just as it took place in parallel to the event, but I thought some readers might find it interesting. I’m the first speaker; the second is a Marxist anthropologist friend of mine, a comrade of protests, meetings, arguments and 12-hour tabletop RPG sessions.

12:43
It got away from you. How exciting!
Creating through dialogue is quite exciting.

12:46
I fucken love it

12:46
This is why I’ve been watching your work with such interest. I knew you were thinking about such things when I was there, and I was just beginning to think about them.

12:50
The more I work with dialogue, the more I become convinced its a vital creative frontier.

12:50
Well working with it makes you realise how much all art (ignoring your essay, or at least its rhetoric) is dialogic, and merely conceals its origins.
Some of the comments around this are relevant:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sei-eEjy4g
People accusing her of “ripping off” the Clash, vs a dialogic understanding of hip-hop.

13:01
Oh yeh, MIA loves pressing those buttons :-D

13:01
Well it’s the essence of hip-hop. There was an amazing paper at this autonomist conference I attended about how hip-hop is an act of creation in the commons.

13:02
And those are the roots of all poetry
Baba Brinkman’s thesis is that hip-hop is a return to the roots of folk poetry and performance

13:02
Well Negri would argue that all productivity is immediately production in common, and it takes juridical private property to convince us otherwise.

13:03
Essay as event… Wonderful.
“Work can be liberated because it is essentially the one human mode of existence which is simultaneously collective, rational and interdependent. It generates solidarity. Capitalism and socialism have only succeeded in subjugating work to a social mechanism which is logocentric or paranoid, authoritarian and potentially destructive.” Negri and Guattari

13:08
Ooh nice

13:14
Damnit, I’m signing up for twitter.

13:17
Oh no!
You’ve buckled
It happens to us all eventually
Do you mind if I publish the bits of this conversation about #GiveUpArt in a reflections blog tomorrow?

2 thoughts on “Performance, Politics, Art, Dialogue and Twitter”

“A hierarchical, authoritarian format will produce thought hemmed in by those structures of power: a horizontal, anarchic format will produce a wild variety of dissent and passionate, provocative thought.”

Too true. We really had to engage with this idea when we were planning out conferences, and with the difficulties it entails. I won’t claim any great degree of success.